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Performer Mike Daisey issues apology for Apple controversy

March 26, 2012 | 12:24
pm

Mike Daisey, the New York theater performer who has been at the center of a media controversy surrounding his solo show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," has issued an apology on his personal blog, saying he "lost his grounding" when he played loose with the facts in his stage monologue.

Daisey posted a blog entry Sunday in which he apologized to audiences, theater colleagues, human rights activists and the journalists to whom he had given interviews. The performer wrote that he "failed to honor the contract I'd established with my audiences over many years and many shows. In doing so, I not only violated their trust, I also made worse art."

Earlier this month, the public-radio program "This American Life" retracted a story in which it featured excerpts from Daisey's show. It said that Daisey had exaggerated and fabricated certain elements of his production, which addresses the relationship between Apple and factories in China that mistreat their workers.

Daisey had performed the show at New York's Public Theater, where he has become something of a regular with his stage monologues. Oskar Eustis, the company's artistic director, issued a statement last week saying that "we would not have called [the show] nonfiction had we known that incidents described in the piece were fabricated. We didn't know, and the result was that our audience was misled."

Daisey wrote Sunday that he "would also like to apologize to the journalists I gave interviews to in which I exaggerated my own experiences. In my drive to tell this story and have it be heard, I lost my grounding. Things came out of my mouth that just weren't true, and over time, I couldn't even hear the difference myself."

In an earlier blog post written after the controversy broke, Daisey took a less conciliatory tone, criticizing journalists for what he saw as their obsession with him at the expense of the larger human-rights issues at stake.

The performer has made changes to his show, adding a prologue explaining the recent controversy and excising the portions that have been called into question.